Boring but True

Leave a reply

Ok, I have 3% power, so I shall be brief. A deeply boring fact I noticed when fiddling with extraction times is that 8 days and 8 hours is the point where an extraction cycle switches from hourly to four hourly.

2%. Ok. So guess what? That’s 200 hours. Neat, isn’t it. Why might you want to know this? Well, it gives your basic processors 8 cycles rather than 2 to chew through P0s before they get another load. So towards the end of the cycle they can be chewing through surplus material and compression means your storage is under less pressure over time.

Just thought I’d share that while I thought about it. 1%. Time to go! I need to find an interesting sounding devblog…

Research Research

Leave a reply
Back in days gone by, I was curious as to how Tech 2 ships and modules were produced, so I started reading around.  Turned out to be a relatively arcane method, but fundamentally you needed to invent a Tech 2 blueprint from a regular blueprint, using invention, an interface and datacores.  Now, datacores turned out to be a commodity that at the time could only really be obtained through research agents.  Agents have changed a fair amount since then, but research agents have not been removed, even if they no longer generate datacores quite as quickly or cheaply.


Research agents basically churn out datacores, worth around 100,000 ISK a pop depending on the type, with no input from you.  So they are as passive an income source as they come, apart from taking the cores to a market hub.  You could of course try invention with them too.  The down side?  You’ve got to grind standing hard to get access to the higher level agents, and there aren’t loads of them.  But, doing PvE for the relevant corporation won’t be too much of a hardship and will after all get you loyalty points.


One note of caution is that even where you have really good standing with the relevant corporation, bear in mind that if you do what I recently did (!) and hurt your faction standing you might find yourself unable to access your research agents.  Diplomacy is your friend in this scenario, and you can always access Level 1 agents of the faction to drag your standing with them back up again.  Just something to keep an eye on.


One last aside, invention can be a passive income generator like manufacture, but you need more skills behind you and sometimes invention produces nothing at all at a cost of the datacores invested.  I have gone so far as to manufacture my own Tech 2 ships in the past, from blueprints I invented, but it requires a fair bit of running around to get the ingredients and was purely for the “I’ve done that” of it! 

Good News, Bad News

Leave a reply

So.  Good news.  I completed the new PI setup to my satisfaction, and I can now turn out twice the number of Recursive Computing Modules and a P3 on one production planet, so everything’s centralised.  Using mainly P2s as the inputs, a Mammoth can happily dump the vast majority of P2s needed into the production planet in one visit, and away it goes.  Shiny.  This is a hi-sec production point, which has turned out to be a very fortunate thing, because…

Bad news.  Some of my main’s planets were in a lo-sec system.  Historically, apart from a few annoying individuals, this wasn’t a problem and my faithful Prowler aka Roadrunner had carried out many, many uneventful collection and delivery runs into the system.  Unfortunately, my main’s corp has had its POCOs in the system wiped out and replaced by ones under new ownership, which I knew was a possibility from recent events.

As it turned out, the new owners aren’t so keen on outsiders using their POCOs (odd, given they would make more money from them, but I don’t think they’re really an industrial Alliance).  So whilst I thought I’d spotted a ship as I came up to one of the new POCOs, I sort of shrugged as I was under cloak.  My mistake.  I took a second too long getting my cargo aboard – proximity to the structure meant I had inevitably decloaked.  Two stealth bombers decloaked and locked me up pretty rapidly, and they had a Dominix and Oracle on fire support.  Scratch one Prowler.  Good news was, I got my pod out in one piece – so no new medical clone required, and no new implants required.  Could have been worse, and I could have sworn my MWD had gotten me far enough out of range to go to warp.  But anyway.  Could have been lag, my rather old laptop struggling, whatever.

Long story short, having looked at the system’s kills for the past few days it’s immediately apparent that these guys are not letting anyone come to play in “their” system.  They’ve locked it down.  So that’s put paid to my lo-sec PI planets.  However, it’s also an opportunity for me to consolidate my PI in hi-sec, which is far less exciting, but far safer, of course.  Fine.  It means I will gather a little less, certainly, but it won’t be too difficult to replicate my original plan, touch wood.

Lessons learned?  Just because you thought a lo-sec system seemed quiet last time you were in it, don’t assume it will be next time, no matter how many visits you’ve made in the past.  Stay cloaked if you can, assess local, think about your best course of action.  Habit probably killed my ship yesterday as much as anything else.  Still, not to worry.  Life goes on.  Some payback would be nice, but I’m not a PvPer and these guys are clearly very good at what they do, so…  Fly safe.  Safer than me, at least!